August 30, 2017

Media Comment: It can be better
By YISRAEL MEDAD AND ELI POLLAK
08/30/2017If the result is that Netanyahu will then actually reconsider and keep his electoral promises, then we will know that the media has changed.
At the Edinburgh International Television festival on August 23, Jon Snow, England’s Channel 4 News presenter, delivered the 2017 James Mac-Taggart memorial lecture. Snow had recently been in a bit of trouble. He was caught shouting a profanity against the Tories this past June at another festival in Glastonbury, an act that compromised his professional ethical duty to maintain a semblance of objectivity.

Snow was rather forthright, saying in Edinburgh that media people have been taught these last two years that “we all know nothing.” The digital media has not “connected us any more effectively with those “left behind – the disadvantaged, the excluded.”

He explained, “The mostly London-based media pundits, pollsters and so-called experts, have got it wrong – the Brexit referendum… [US President Donald] Trump… [the UK] general election.” His conclusion was astonishing: “We in the media are comfortable with the elite, with little awareness, contact, or connection with those not of the elite.”

He illustrated the ignorance by noting that when he Googled “Grenfell Tower” – the British apartment tower that burned in June, killing close to 100 people – a blog post was found from eight months prior to the disaster, not penned by any journalist, that highlighted the dangers of the building.

“The echelons from which our media are drawn do not, for the most part, fully reflect the population among whom we live and to whom we seek to transmit information and ideas,” he declared.

Anyone who has been following our columns regularly knows that our criticism of Israel’s own media elite, the branja, pinpoints those very themes with one major addition of our own: the decidedly Left-leaning political bias and liberal cultural partisanship.

Another insight was provided by Conrad Black, writing in The National Review in mid-August, after viewing Copy, Jacob Bernstein’s documentary life of his mother, Nora Ephron. He came away with “a much clearer picture… of the force, attractiveness and danger of that talented cultural, media and entertainment world of which she was such a prominent figure.” It gave him “a clear view of their collective self-absorption… [They] believe[d] that their media and entertainment world is, in effect, the real world, a world of great power and influence and virtue – and much the most interesting world of any.”

That, too, resonates with Israel’s own branja. We maintain that they display, as Black said about North America’s media elite, “the vulgarity, vacuity, and reckless contempt for the public and for any notion of duty to reflect society with balance and integrity…” They demonstrate they can be “a group of anti-theistic, ultra-materialistic, narcissistic poseurs, hedonists of self-celebration.”

The question is: Is there an alternative?

In an August 20 BuzzFeed report called “The Rise of Israel’s Right-Wing Media,” Miriam Berger writes Channel 20’s TV program “The Patriots.” She sees it as “trying to model itself after Fox News.” In her perception, “more often than not, they argue over whether Israel’s politics are right-leaning enough.”

She is perceptive enough to know that “for years, Israel’s Hebrew-speaking media was dominated by a relatively centrist, liberal press,” but “now overtly rightwing media figures…are increasingly normal. They proudly air their politics – and broadcast a more religious nationalist and populist agenda for Israel.” Disparagingly, she adds that this is part of a “similar progression” to “the rise of so-called alt-right media” in US politics.

YET, ISRAELIS are also quick to point out that actually we here have been a harbinger for the US – and the anti-liberal, “strongman” wave that turbulently swept through much of the Middle East and Europe. Back in 2015, most of Israel’s feisty media predicted that Netanyahu would lose the general elections. He won and hasn’t stopped gleefully reminding journalists since. This coincided with a majority of Israelis feeling that the media was untrustworthy, with a leftist bias. Together with technological advances, it also led to a growth in more overtly partisan media outlets.

Unfortunately, instead of being a professional neutral observer, Berger writes that Israel’s “media is changing… reflecting tensions at the heart of the country’s politics and society” as if the assertion that for decades the media was slanted to the Left was the preferred situation. She quotes Oren Persico of The Seventh Eye that “the media is just another front for this confrontation between the old secular elites who are Center-Left and the new elites of religious Right.”

Persico disputes the claim that Israel’s media has a left-wing bias, making it clear to all that he is not exactly an objective observer of Israel’s media. Berger then quotes Erel Segal of Channel 20: “Nobody believes in objectivity anymore.” The bottom line of Berger is that Israel does have an alternative today.

We feel that the competition between the various news outlets need not be politicized and rooted in ideological outlooks. True, too often, we have seen the same type of journalist move from Galei Tzahal to Channel One and then on to Channels Two and Ten as well as into the print media. More often than not, they simply replicate the type of questions they will be asking (heavily anti-Netanyahu rather than anti-government) and the topics they’ll be covering (usually the “occupation”) over the reality that is the real news.

They will continue to oppress various minorities that will rarely be provided with platforms or afforded a sense of normalcy – such as women, immigrants, especially from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, Arabs and haredim. But they will staunchly defend the illegal immigrants living in southern Tel Aviv at the expense of the Israelis living there legally. After all, the illegals are mostly black and political correctness says that black is always right.

Too much attention is paid to fashion and food – all too expensive. The media will be sympathetic to the invalids who have been violating the law, obstructing traffic and getting away with it, all in an attempt to take more money out of the taxpayers. They will never seriously question the invalid’s morals and outright violations of the law as they did to the Gush Katif demonstrators who tried to do just the same – obstruct the traffic.

At this point, Channel 20 is the beginning of an alternative, but it is far from being sufficient. The blogs, tweets and various websites providing alternative news and opinion are part of the solution, but also not sufficient. We will know that Israel’s media had changed on the day that the prime minister is pressed with questions about his lack of faithfulness to his voters.

If the result is that Netanyahu will then actually reconsider and keep his electoral promises, then we will know that the media has changed.

Is this possible? Yes, but only if the public is sufficiently vociferous in its demand for such a change.

August 29, 2017

(The writer represents the Shilo community in the Binyamin Regional Council.)

(July 26, 1996) — I was still a teenager when in 1966 I first visited Amatzia, a moshav on Israel’s border facing the Hebron Hills. A few months later I would spend a full half-year there, working its fields and riding its herd of beef cattle.

The security situation then was dangerous. Infiltrations were rampant. Our fields were occasionally damaged and our livestock stolen. On Independence Day Eve the community was penetrated. An empty house was partially destroyed by explosives laid by Arab terrorists.

The Arabs were violently opposed to a Jewish presence in the Jewish homeland. But I and the permanent residents were Zionist pioneers. We accepted the reality.

As pioneers we deserved – and received – public support. That was the fact of our lives. We were settling the land, developing its potential and protecting other communities, those located in the “middle” of the country.

We were following in the paths of many thousands before us from both sides of the political spectrum who had asserted a Jewish presence in the Jewish homeland during previous generations.

The army cooperated fully with us and our needs. We devoted many hours each month to guard duty. The return trip from Kiryat Gat at night was hazardous. Social and cultural activities were rare and our relative isolation was yet another burden.

But we were Zionist pioneers and that was something to be proud of.

Thirty years later my 15-year-old son Nedavya watched me attempting to dislodge trespassers out to destroy Jewish agriculture and irrigation equipment while he extinguished blazing fields set afire by enemies of a Jewish presence in the Jewish homeland.

He saw many dozens of Arabs storm the area under cultivation. They tore down two fences, lit fires, uprooted olive saplings and broke others. They threw rocks and brandished sticks.

Nedavya witnessed, as I did a generation ago and as did others in earlier generations, Arab violence against so-called “settlements.” And so the cycle continues.

That “settlements” are an obstacle is nothing new in the Zionist lexicon. In 1920 the Jewish “settlement” in Jerusalem was attacked by Arab rioters; a year later the Jewish “settlement” in Jaffa was attacked.

Kibbutzim and cities were “settlements.” And “settlers” were haredim slaughtered in Hebron and ideological secularists in the Jezreel Valley. Yet there will always be a future to the concept of settling the Land.

FOREIGN observers and Jewish opponents to a Jewish presence throughout the Jewish homeland are quite interested these days in whether the communities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza are to expand.

Of course they will. Former government edicts will be invalidated. Projects will be unfrozen. Certain essentials that only government can provide will be made available and private investors and entrepreneurs will be invited to help.

An attitude of empathy and admiration will be forthcoming from Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition. That’s what he promised; that’s what we expect.

Unlike some pronouncements made recently regarding a major population growth, most of the residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza are aware that the heady days of the mid-1980s cannot be repeated.

The Oslo accords hang, albatross-like, around the prime minister’s neck. President Clinton’s peace team keeps up the pressure. Arabs, like those in Shilo last week, will seek to create provocations.

Nevertheless, those in power know that without the presence of Jews in Judea, Samaria and Gaza the situation would be worse.

In the first instance, if the communities are at all an “obstacle,” they are an obstacle to an independent PLO state, the creation of which would be existentially inimical to Israel.

Secondly, Israel cannot continue simply on the basis of a “New Middle East” vision combined with the thrust of academic “post-Zionism.” The linking of these two ideals is a destructive force.

The return to basics, to the fundamental imperatives of Zionism as exemplified by some 150,000 Judea, Samaria and Gaza residents in over 140 communities is not only inspiring. It is the soul of what this country is.

I have full confidence that my son will overcome the scene he witnessed. I do not believe that his psyche was damaged or that the humanist values we instilled in him will be injured.

I am not elated that he is replaying elements of the Arab-Jewish conflict. But I have faith that he and his generation will persevere in guarding and taking care of the land.

For my son is a Zionist and a vital aspect of Zionism is the physical presence in the Jewish homeland. Without the vistas of our 3,500-year history here, its successes and failures, the exile and destruction as well as the heroic return and reconstruction, we have no future.

And we intend there to be no doubt about the future. We in Judea, Samaria and Gaza have settled that.

What Unites Shiloh and Jerusalem
March 31, 2010 (Published in the Forward)
I have news for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Not only is Jerusalem not a “settlement” — as he correctly noted in his speech before the convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — but neither is my hometown of Shiloh.

Since late November, and at Netanyahu’s initiative, Zionism has been in a stage of suspension. A suspension of construction, that is, although some see in this policy a broader suspension of the goals at the heart of Zionism itself. The object of this abject exercise was to lure Palestinian Authority negotiators back to the table, as well as to relieve American diplomatic pressure on Israel.

On both these counts, of course, it has been a failure. We are still stuck on the matter of “proximity talks,” a euphemistic term for mediated, indirect discussions akin to those that took place 70 years ago.

In early 1939, the British attempted similar talks, at the St. James Conference in London, with the Zionist and Arab delegations each on a separate floor. That turned out to be a prelude to the rejection of the idea of a Jewish national home via the British Parliament’s adoption of the infamous 1939 White Paper, which closed the gates to large-scale Jewish immigration. The petulant behavior of the Obama administration thus recalls other disastrous developments that the Jewish people have been forced to confront.

In Shiloh we are very much aware of being on the cutting-edge of an international confrontation that demands facing up to Arab terror, overcoming our media image and dealing with the undermining influence of “humanitarian” groups, as well as the foibles of our own government. In many respects, this is nothing new for us.

In early 1978, President Jimmy Carter was angered by the founding of Shiloh. The president had assumed, mistakenly, that then prime minister Menachem Begin had committed himself to what today would be called a “settlement freeze.” Carter demanded that Shiloh be dismantled.

That was 32 years ago. From the eight families who had moved to the site where the Tabernacle was erected, where Joshua divided the Land of Israel into tribal portions and where Samuel was instructed to become a prophet, we are now almost 300 families. Where one temporary encampment existed, the Shiloh Bloc today consists of 10 communities and satellite neighborhoods with almost 8,000 people.

Our primary school is undergoing an expansion that will double its size. Just before the moratorium on building, we finished 10 housing units. More plots, authorized years ago, are being built. Our vineyards are producing wine. Our fruit and olive trees echo the biblical promise of Jeremiah 31:5 — “Again shall you plant vineyards upon the mountains of Samaria.” And our children, our true future, belie all the demographic horror stories.

Our confidence is not without consideration for our sacrifices. There is a street in Shiloh with 10 houses. Four families on that street have suffered losses from Arab terror. One 16-year-old was killed in the 2008 massacre at Jerusalem’s Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva. A 17-year-old, living in the house next door, died in a suicide bombing, which also killed the 16-year-old granddaughter of the family next door on the other side. Four houses down from there is the home of a 17-year-old who was gunned down while playing on his high school’s outdoor basketball court during the second intifada.

Security is never far from our minds, despite our insistence on concentrating on the positive aspects that are at the core of Zionism: reclaiming our land, rebuilding it, assuring the continued existence of the Jewish national home and promoting the safety and spiritual and cultural renaissance of all its citizens. We are quite far from the security barrier. But we are very close to Jerusalem, in a spiritual and national sense. The territory that we live on and cultivate may be labeled “disputed,” but almost 90 years ago the entire civilized world, in the framework of the League of Nations, guaranteed my right and that of all Jews to reconstitute the Jewish national home, including in the area where three generations of my family now live.

Those who do not recognize our rights in Shiloh also do not do so in Jerusalem. Not only have American administrations refused to act in good faith in implementing the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act passed by Congress, but the traditional policy of the State Department has been to not recognize Israel’s sovereignty in its capital city, even over West Jerusalem neighborhoods. And on July 4, 1967, the United States voted for U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2253, which opposed any alteration in the city’s status.

The current dispute with the United States highlights the reality that the Obama administration does not distinguish between Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem and communities in Judea and Samaria. To the White House, both are “settlements.” Or, as we say in my hometown, before there was Jerusalem, there was Shiloh, and our destinies cannot be separated.

August 16, 2017

Prime Minister Netanyahu had 10 years to provide the electorate with a free media market.

Last Wednesday evening, we witnessed the latest round of the slugfest between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the media.

In what The New York Times termed a “pugnacious” event, and described as being in “Trumpian fashion,” Netanyahu came out swinging in response to the role of the media in pushing, framing and highlighting the allegations that he has acted criminally in various cases now under police and state prosecutor investigation.

Some of his remarks included: “You remember that the fake news media have been hammering us in a unified choir … because both the Left and the media – it’s the same thing, you know – they are enlisting now in an obsessive, unprecedented hunting trip … with the goal of carrying out a government coup … The media and the Left contrive endless scandals … to apply unacceptable and incessant pressure on law enforcement authorities … The thought police in the media are working full time … The media and the Left that it serves.”

As prime minister, Netanyahu should know better. Criticizing the media is too often a necessary exercise; in our column we do it all the time. Yet there is a fine line that divides between criticism and sensationalism, and Netanyahu crossed it. A serious journalist is not allowed to ignore for example tape recordings of the prime minister’s conversation with Arnon Mozes, Yediot Aharonot’s owner/publisher.

Here too though there is a clear line between reporting events and attempting to manage them. Just as Netanyahu should stay calm in his criticism of his detractors, so too the media should not paint the prime minister in unacceptable colors. Too many senior members of the “branja,” the Israeli term for the media elite, provided disconcerting examples of extreme bias and cheap, unacceptable rhetoric.

Dan Margalit, fired by Israel Hayom and hired by Haaretz, tweeted “Bibi [Netanyahu] … described the media just as antisemites describe Jews.” Raffi Mann, associate professor in the School of Communications in Ariel University, tweeted a poster mentioning nine leaders, such as Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, together with Netanyahu and added a caption: “Conclave of the Knights of Democracy: we have made it to the finals.”

We all know Netanyahu has not touched a journalist, let alone jailed one. The comparison calls into question Prof. Mann’s professional judgment.

Haaretz’s Doron Rosenblum posted a wellknown 1930s picture of a large crowd of Nazis with only one person not raising his hand in the Sieg Heil salute, with the caption: “Already tonight he’ll be hearing from [MK David] Bitan.” Bitan organized the Likud Netanyahu support rally. Comparing Likudniks with Nazis is a bit strong.

As if linking Nazism to Netanyahu was not enough, Israel Prize for journalism laureate Nahum Barnea of Yedioth Ahronot wrote, “… Bibi is back on the balcony. As he was then, in October 1995, at Jerusalem’s Zion Square. The same hand-waving….” He was referring to the false charge that Netanyahu was identifying with a photo-montage of then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin dressed in an SS uniform and encouraging those shouting that Rabin was a traitor.

Barnea insisted there was now as then “the same demagoguery, the same incitement… the same sarcasm, the same manipulations.”

We can attest that in every demonstration at that time, Netanyahu immediately admonished publicly and clearly anyone who called Rabin a traitor. But for Barnea, Netanyahu is Rabin’s murderer.

Haaretz guest columnist and Hebrew University professor Daniel Blatman, who sees almost everything the Likud and the Right does as Nazi-linked, sure enough warned in Friday’s edition that Israel is close to a Weimar Republic collapse.

Just last Thursday, CNN severed ties with Jeffrey Lord, a regular network pundit, after he had tweeted “Sieg Heil!” in what Lord characterized as an attempt to “mock” Nazism and fascism in a tangle with the president of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group. Even though Twitter accounts are considered private expressions of opinion, CNN took another view. In Israel, it seems, the responses depend on who makes them.

Despite all this media misbehavior, the real question is not how bad our media is, but rather whether it isn’t the prime minister himself who is responsible for failing to protect Israel’s citizens from the media’s bias? Wasn’t he, until May 28, communications minister? A post he held for two years? As prime minister doesn’t he have a say in what is happening in the communications ministry? Netanyahu has had ample time to fundamentally change Israel’s media market yet has not. Netanyahu, former communications minister Gilad Erdan and his government relinquished control of Israel’s public broadcasters.

They established the Kan conglomerate such that it is controlled by an elitist board and not by the taxpayer and her representatives. This perpetuated the stranglehold of opinionated, amateurish staff on the public broadcaster.

Had Netanyahu done his job and eliminated Army Radio and limited Israel Radio, the media scene would have been much improved.

Public radio broadcasters in Israel are not only subsidized by the state, they are allowed to sell advertisements. This hits the consumer twice. First, we are the victims of unreasonably long advertising slots on the airwaves. Secondly, and more important, the public broadcasters control the advertising market. They set the rates and the private radio broadcasters cannot compete; they do not get state subsidies. The result is that Israel does not have an open radio market.

The TV situation is not much better. Why in this day and age are we limited to Channels 2, 10 and Kan 11? The three TV channels have consistently made it a point to cover sensational and sometimes unsupported news about the various Netanyahu-related investigations.

They can do so because there is no serious competition which would expose them.

One can only wonder why to this very day Israel’s electronic media is controlled by regulatory boards who prefer their own self-serving interests. For years, they have done everything possible to prevent true competition on the airwaves. But Netanyahu and his governments, who appointed these boards, sat on the sidelines. How does it happen that TV Channel 20, which had to struggle to be allowed to broadcast news, is fined for not balancing a program while TV channels 2 and 10 are subsidized by the government to the tune of hundreds of millions of shekels despite their daily violations of the regulations requiring balance and pluralism? For the past 10 years, the only real action by our prime minster to uphold media pluralism was his defense of the Israel Hayom newspaper.

Even here though, he did not defend it out of ideology, believing that Israel needs a free media market. He defended it only because it supported him.

Prime Minister Netanyahu had 10 years to provide the electorate with a free media market.

This would have provided many new perspectives on the news, better and perhaps more informed sources and commentators.

The boring media chorus of today is a direct result of a prime minster who refused to govern.

He is eating today the cake that he baked for so long.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, stop crying – do something! If you only wanted to, you could.

August 2, 2017

Ten years ago, Israel’s media was dominated by journalists and academics who had a rather narrow definition of press freedom.

It was 10 years ago this week that the free newspaper Israel Hayom appeared.

In the beginning it was published only on weekdays. After two years its weekend edition was distributed on Fridays. We are proud that Israel’s Media Watch awarded the paper’s founding editor, Amos Regev, the Abramowitz Israeli Prize for Media Criticism in 2010. As we noted then, the paper changed Israel’s media map. The hegemony of Yediot Aharonot/Ma’ariv/Haaretz was broken. The Israel Hayom editorial line is proud and unapologetic patriotism.

Ten years ago, Israel’s media was dominated by journalists and academics who had a rather narrow definition of press freedom. In accordance with post-modernist ideology, to them a free press is one that attacks and criticizes the government. As if without such (daily) criticism – and it does not matter if it is true and substantiated – their freedom is somehow curtailed.

The flip side is that if a media outlet does not criticize the government, it is suspect for not doing the job the media clique had framed for it. Worse, support or praise of a government is viewed as an anti-democratic act that borders on treason, at least to the profession of journalism. And in the relativism matrix of post-modernism, they deny for others the very “freedom” they champion for fellow journalists and media owners. This attitude is also carried over into media critique columns published in the mainstream press, locking out anyone not toeing the liberal and progressive line.

Israel Hayom suffered from this attitude.

For years, its journalists were shunned by the mainstream media, denying them exposure. They were not interviewed as experts or commentators by the electronic media. The paper’s op-ed articles were ignored. Indeed, Israel’s Media Watch presented the now defunct Israel Broadcasting Authority with statistics showing how the morning headlines came primarily from Ha’aretz and Yediot, and always first, while Israel Hayom was almost nonexistent.

The media called the paper the “Bibiton” (a portmanteau of the Hebrew word for newspaper, “iton,” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nickname, “Bibi,”), denigrating it for its consistent support for Netanyahu. This is true, the paper did support the prime minister, unabashedly. But Yediot Aharonot supported Ehud Olmert, now a convicted criminal, for many years.

At the same time, it insisted that it was the “newspaper of the country.” The media never took Yediot to task for this, it was not called the “Olmerton.” It was considered to be influential and its journalists were media stars.

But just as the Israelites in Egypt, so with Israel Hayom – “the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and spread.” Israelis are no fools. First of all, who says no to a free newspaper? More meaningful, many subscribers left the old guard of Haaretz and Yediot for Israel Hayom.

The numbers speak for themselves. Today, it is the country’s most read newspaper on weekdays, with 39.2% of the public reading it, 5% more than its rival, and on July 20, TGI announced it had overtaken Yediot in weekend circulation.

The paper’s popularity was so threatening, especially to Israel’s Left, that the Left went on a campaign to pass a law to stop it. Legislation was submitted in 2014 by former minister and now Labor MK Eitan Cabel and sponsored by members of five other Knesset parties which sought to prohibit a full-sized paper published six days a week to be given out freely. Not only that, its price had to be at least 70% of that of competing papers. Yair Lapid, a former Yediot journalist, and his party Yesh Atid voted for Cabel’s bill. The bill garnered support even from Israel’s Right. Ministers Naftali Bennet and Ayelet Shaked of Bayit Yehudi initially supported the legislation, but then were absent at the vote.

There are those who claim that Prime Minister Netanyahu called for new elections in 2015 to prevent Israel Hayom’s closing as it generated his most important support base. If this was indeed the case then there is no better proof of the paper’s essential contribution to Israeli society and democracy.

At the outset, to receive legitimacy, the paper hired known left-wing journalists to provide “balance.” People like Dan Margalit and Mordechai Gilat were paid handily to attire the paper’s pages with their names and left-wing point of view. But after 10 years the paper matured. With the change of chief editors a few months ago, Margalit and others were removed and replaced by unabashed Israeli conservatives such as Amnon Lord, former editor of Makor Rishon, and Akiva Bigman, former editor of the Mida website.

In retrospect, Israel Hayom’s journalistic contributions were not spectacular. It did not “break” the story of Olmert’s criminal acts.

Journalist Yoav Yitzchak and his News1 website had many more spectacular investigative achievements during these 10 years. This is not to belittle the acumen of Israel Hayom’s present editor, Boaz Bismuth, who, as the paper’s chief foreign correspondent, and against the opinion of all his peers, consistently wrote that Donald Trump had a good chance of winning the US presidential election. In fact, it is this politically incorrect point of view which is perhaps the best characteristic of the newspaper.

It is also expressed by Dr. Dror Eydar.

He was an unknown before Israel Hayom.

His consistent writing and commentary, supporting Israeli settlement of Judea and Samaria, expressing the futility of a “twostate solution” and supporting right-wing legislation against foreign-funded NGOs and more is slowly but surely conferring celebrity status on him. Over the past few years he has been invited time and again as a commentator and presenter for Israel’s electronic media. Not enough, not as much as Yediot’s people, but he’s getting there.

The paper also provides former justice minister Yossi Beilin, one of most important persons responsible for the Oslo Accords and the leader of the Geneva Initiative, with a platform to express his leftwing views. And even though supports Netanyahu it does not keep its readers in the dark about his negative actions.

Israel Hayom’s founding editor Amos Regev wrote in the paper this past Sunday: “The past decade was a fantastic journey … it entailed daily hard work in a media market, facing a blunt, coarse and cynical monopoly… of those who consider that they are the sole thinkers… opposing a left-wing media which idolized the peace process and is not willing to listen to any other opinion.”

He summarized the paper’s ethos: “At Israel Hayom we always remember that first and foremost we are Israelis and that the State of Israel is the only state of the people of Israel and a red line defends her – the IDF, police and other security organs.”

Israeli society should be grateful to Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson for giving us such an important present without which Israel would not have a truly free press.

We wish Channel 2’s Gilad Shalmor a full recovery from his severe beating incurred while covering rioting in Jaffa.